Quotes About Virtue

If rank and money come with love and virtue, also, I should accept them gratefully, and enjoy your good fortune, but I know, by experience, how much genuine happiness can be had in a plain little house, where the daily bread is earned, and some privations give sweetness to the few pleasures.

For the sincere wish to be good is half the battle.

El verdadero talento, la verdadera bondad, no pasan mucho tiempo inadvertidos, pero, aunque así sea, la conciencia de poseerlos y usar bien de ellos debiera satisfacerle a uno, y el mayor encanto de toda cualidad es la modestia.

for though we do want to be good, it's hard work, and we forget, and don't do our best.

Many men can be what the world calls great: very few men are what God calls good. This is the harder task to choose, yet the only success that satisfies, the only honor that outlives death.

It's highly virtuous to say we'll be good, but we can't do it all at once, and it takes a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together before some of us even get our feet set in the right way.

Tienes bastante talento y virtudes, pero no hay que hacer ostentación porque la vanidad estropea el carácter más fino.

El verdadero talento y bondad no pasan mucho tiempo inadvertidos; aunque pasaran, el conocimiento de poseerlo y de usarlo bien debe satisfacernos.

It was as if her own conscience had taken human shape, for his voice eloquently uttered the fears, the feelings that had filled her heart that night. She had wavered, for love was sweet and life looked desolate without it; but the example of this man who asked nothing for himself and was as true to his own soul as he would have her to hers, touched and inspired her with a brave desire to be worthy his respect, to emulate his virtue.

La vanidad echa a perder las mejores cualidades. El talento y la bondad nunca pasan inadvertidos y, aunque así fuera, la conciencia de tenerlos y hacer buen uso de ellos debería bastar. Las virtudes quedan ensalzadas por la modestia.

Many men can be what the world calls great: very few men are what God calls good.

Young things like you don't need any ornaments but those you wear to-night: youth, health, intelligence, and modesty.

contuve mis lagrimas hasta que se hubiese marchado. ¿Por qué he de quejarme cuando no hemos hecho más que lo correcto y al fin seremos más felices por haberlo hecho?

Hamilton then picked up a slim volume on the table and turned it over in his hands. "Ah, this is the constitution," he said. "Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.

He did not boast. I have never heard him boast.

There can be no freedom without order, and there is no order without virtue. Now, that's a simple enough formulation, but it's an insight found not only in the writings of Founding Fathers like Washington or great political thinkers like Edmund Burke; it is also found in a great part of our Judeo-Christian tradition.

Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation, because your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are."1

Nadie se resignaba ya a ser en parte bueno y en parte malo, como siempre habían sido, sino que, enardecidos por la grandilocuencia de sus propias mentiras todos querían hacerse pasar por puros y perfectos.

La vida es justamente eso, un camino azaroso entre tentaciones; y la probidad no depende únicamente de la virtud de cada cual, sino también, y en cierta medida, de la suerte. De cómo, cuándo y dónde te han tentado.

I suppose that one of the reasons we find it so hard to come to terms with the Holocaust is that pre-Nazi German society looks so like our own at the same period, and we are forced to the unpalatable conclusion that if it happened there because of lack of virtue in its members, we must have been similarly lacking and might have gone the same way.

Though it may be the peculiar happiness of Socrates and other geniuses of his stamp, to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for its preservation on the reasonings of the individuals that compose it. Par 1, 36

More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.

When a man does good work out of all proportion to his pay, in seven cases out of nine there is a woman at the back of the virtue. The two exceptions must have suffered from sunstroke.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!